The Primrose Switchback

by Jo Bannister

  “No,” agreed Rosie, deep in thought. “You don’t have to be right all the time. Just when it matters.”

  Prufrock had no luck with the local paper: back issues older than twelve months were bound and filed at the central library. So he phoned the library.

  The librarian consulted an index and turned up the right issue first time. She faxed a copy of the report to the Chronicle where Rosie collected it. It referred to a case in the Crown Court in March 1997. The defendant was Roy Burgess and the charge was incest.

  “Dear heaven,” whispered Prufrock, white-faced. “She was raped by her own father.”

  “Actually,” said Rosie, who’d kept reading, “no, she wasn’t. At least, the jury didn’t think so.”

  “You mean … she just said she was?! That’s almost worse. What kind of people do that?”

  “Sick ones,” said Rosie. “And mad ones, and bad ones. The other possibility, of course, is that she wasn’t lying. That the jury was wrong.”

  “And that’s what Jackie was doing? Trying to get justice for her friend?”

  Rosie blew a silent whistle. “It’s possible, isn’t it? It would certainly have made a humdinger of a show. If she could pull it off, correct a miscarriage of justice in front of a TV audience, she wouldn’t be stuck as a researcher much longer.”

  “So she went after Roy Burgess,” ruminated Prufrock. “She found evidence that wasn’t available to the jury, that would have changed their whole view of the case. Another victim, perhaps; some other vulnerable young girl he’d had contact with?”

  Rosie picked up the thread. “Only he got wind of what she was doing. She may even have told him, invited him to come clean before she exposed him on television. He’d just about lived down the trial, he was damned if he was going to have the whole thing raked up again. A man who’d abuse his own daughter – he wouldn’t find it hard to kill someone else’s.”

  “What does he do for a living?”

  Rosie scanned the report. The answer was disappointing. “He’s a motor mechanic.” Then her voice dropped half an octave. “But he used to be in the SAS. Arthur, you were in the forces. Tell me if that means what I think it means.”

  “Oh yes,” he said, with hollow conviction. “They’re trained to kill, all right. I mean, every soldier is – it’s the only reason for having an army – but the SAS are specialists. They’ll kill anyone with anything, but knives are the weapon of choice. Easily concealed, easily explained, silent, fast and untraceable. Jackie Pickering could certainly have been murdered by an ex-member of the Special Air Service.”

  All at once it was coming together, almost quicker than they could deal with it.

  “Why the station?” mused Rosie. “Well, because he lives in Nottingham and she lived in Skipley. She wouldn’t give him her address, thought she was safe meeting him off the train. He came by rail because it was safer – there was no chance of a security camera picking up his car numberplate, proving he was in town.”

  “Why did she meet him? Why take that risk?” “She wanted a confession. For the programme, and for her own satisfaction. I bet she had a tape recorder on her. It wasn’t found, but only because he got there first. If she could wind up her programme with a confession she had it all. Producer? – they’d have made her a partner for that. She wanted two things, and she wanted them desperately enough to get careless. She wanted justice for her friend, and she wanted advancement for herself. She gambled on getting both at once, and she lost.”

  “Then why does Shad think he killed her?”

  Rosie had no idea. But even before she was paid to have all the answers she hated admitting to ignorance. “Well, because he’s a psychic and …” No, that didn’t seem to work. “Perhaps he’s …” She knew she wasn’t fooling him, gave up before she dug herself in deeper. “Arthur, I don’t know. When we know exactly what happened perhaps we’ll understand that too.”

  “So – now we talk to Superintendent Marsh?”

  “No. Now we go and see Roy Burgess.”

  “What!”

  “I’m not accusing a man of murder without ever setting eyes on him. What if he’s crippled with arthritis? What if he lost an arm on active service? We don’t even have to talk with him, but we do have to see him – just to make sure I’m not making a complete idiot of myself.”

  “Rosie, he could be – if this is Shad’s way out he has to be – a murderer! You can’t just walk up to him and count his limbs. You need a cover story for when he asks what you want.”

  “All right,” agreed Rosie, “then I’ll tell him … I’ll say …” She thought a moment longer. “Then you’ll tell him you want your car serviced. You’re a sweet little old gentleman: he’ll never suspect you of subterfuge.”

  “He might. When he asks me what’s wrong with it and I can’t remember which is the brake pedal and which is the … you know, the go-faster one. I can’t drive, Rosie! I’ve never driven, and I’ve never owned a car.”

  “Oh, don’t be so defeatist! He’ll never notice.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Before they left for Nottingham, Rosie rang Fellowes Hall. She was still looking for proof, but from believing that Shad had probably done what he thought he’d done, she’d come to think it was most unlikely. There was the wound that didn’t look it had been inflicted by a gardener. There was the court case in which Jackie’s best friend had been branded a liar and the man who may have raped her set free. There was the researcher’s desire to make a name for herself with the story no one else knew about, that she was bringing to some kind of a climax the day she died. Someone may have had a good reason to kill her, and someone may have known how to do it; and Shad didn’t fit the bill on either score. Rosie wanted him to know that.

  But Shad and Doctor Cunningham were mutually engaged, so she left a message with the receptionist. “Tell him he didn’t do it and we’re going to prove it.”

  Shad Lucas drifted on a blood-red tide, almost detached from reality, too far from shore for any cries of his to be heard or heeded. The ghosts of memories, not all his own, washed in and out, little snapshots of experience he couldn’t connect with. He understood very little of what was happening to him. A voice came through the red mist – not from the shore but from above: the voice of God – reassuring, telling him everything was all right, but he didn’t understand that either. He had no sense of time or direction, only the vague awareness that if he could get his wits together he’d be very much afraid. But something was stopping him. Not the voice – which was saying words he ought to know but which remained stubbornly meaningless – but the tide. Something in the blood-red tide was coming between him and what was. He didn’t know how he’d got here. He didn’t know if he’d ever be able to leave.

  The voice said, “It’s all right, Shad. You’re safe. Let go. I know you’re disorientated: that’s just the drugs. Let go of the present and drift back. You’re warm, you’re comfortable, you’re quite safe. Drift back until you come to the railway yards again. There – do you see them? There’s not much light but you can see the moon glinting on the rails. Are you there?

  “Good. You’re not alone. There’s someone with you. Do you see her? That’s right – Jackie’s walking beside you. You’re talking together. Arguing? Is she angry?”

  The merest whisper of breath escaped him. “Afraid.”

  “Before that, Shad,” said the voice of God. “Before she was afraid. Wasn’t she angry? Weren’t you both angry?”

  “We were?” It wasn’t like being there. It was like seeing an image begin to coalesce in a tray of photographic developer. He was looking at nothing, and then the words made the picture appear. “We were.”

  “Why were you angry?”

  “She used me.”

  “Why was she angry?”

  “She …” The fractional shake of his head set the whole of the blood-red tide rocking. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” God insisted gently. “She was using you. You didn’t
want to be used like that, you tried to stop her. She was angry because you wouldn’t cooperate. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you argued and you walked. Why didn’t you just leave her there?”

  “She had enough …”

  “Ah. She already had enough on you to make her programme. You had to stop her.”

  “Yes.”

  “But she wouldn’t give it up. It was her key to a better career and you were the price of it. When did you realise she wouldn’t change her mind?”

  A long pause while the red tide rocked. “At the wagons? No, nearly. I held her arm and kept her walking. She started to shout: I put my hand over her mouth. She struggled but she wasn’t strong enough. I pushed her into the last wagon and got in after her.”

  “Where did the knife come from?”

  “Under my shirt. Taped to my side, out of sight.” He was so tired.

  God nodded. “I see. You thought you might need it?”

  “She used me,” he said again. “She was going to … going to …” He drew a breath. “People don’t understand. They’re afraid. They think I’m something … other. A freak. I get that from their heads. Freak. Look at the freak. Don’t go near the freak. That freak’d better not come near me.

  “What she was going to do – she’d have crucified me. I couldn’t… All those scared, angry people. In my head. After my hide.”

  “You were afraid.”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought that if she exposed you, people wouldn’t understand. Would be scared of you, want to hurt you.”

  “Yes.”

  “A witch-hunt.”

  A barely audible whisper. “Yes.”

  “It was self-defence. You thought you had to kill her to protect yourself.”

  “I … killed her.”

  “Did you, Shad? With the knife you had taped to your side? Because if you hadn’t she’d have crucified you? Is that what happened?”

  “Yes.” Tears welled under his shut lids and ran back into his hair, and by that way trickled down into the blood-red tide. So he came to understand the nature of the sea he was adrift upon. Blood and tears; and he thought there was no way back.

  Alex enjoyed holding the fort. The office was very quiet: of course, on a Wednesday everyone involved in producing the Chronicle was at full stretch. Once Dan Sale stuck his head in with a query and left satisfied with the answer; otherwise she saw no one. But she felt more content than she had for some time – and not just since Matt had dropped his bombshell. She no longer had any doubts about the wisdom of what they were doing. It couldn’t feel this right and be wrong.

  She’d rather hoped he might come down from his eyrie in the roof and join her for a sandwich at lunchtime. But he didn’t and, on reflection, she appreciated his tact. It had been Alex who’d worried how the new developments would affect their professional relationship. She was pleased Matt wasn’t going to embarrass her with his attentions; at least not yet.

  In fact, she was having lunch when the phone rang. It was the front desk. “Someone to see you, Alex. Apparently you wrote to a Fran Barclay, in reply to a letter?”

  “Oh yes.” Her mind scanned swiftly over what she’d written but she couldn’t think what the problem was. Maybe the girl only wanted to thank her for her advice. “I’ll be right down.”

  She extracted the original letter and the copy of her reply from the file and headed for the lift, refreshing her memory as she went. The girl who loved her man enough to leave him if that was what his career demanded – that was the one.

  Sylvia Stone, who manned the front desk and the switchboard, took in small ads and orders for photographs, and advised people who came in to complain about something but weren’t sure who they needed to shout at, was engaged with one of Skipley’s undertakers when Alex got out of the lift and she didn’t like to interrupt. The Funeral Homes sent in lists of death notices early in the week, with the option to update just prior to publication. If someone else died, that is: names were almost never deleted.

  She glanced around the small office, with its front door on to the street and its back door into the works where once the great presses had thundered, now full of computers and sloping glass tables where the pages were made up. There were two people waiting for Sylvia but neither of them looked like her correspondent: one was an elderly lady, the other a young man. Alex waited patiently until the undertaker took himself off.

  “What happened to …?”

  Sylvia nodded over her shoulder and Alex turned round, puzzled that she’d managed to miss someone in the tiny office.

  She hadn’t. The young man smiled at her. He was tall and fair, with a fair moustache and warm eyes. “Miss Fisher? I wanted to thank you for your letter. I also wanted to clarify something.”

  Alex returned the smile. “You must be Jamie.”

  The man crinkled his nose in a rueful sniff. “Well, that’s what I wanted to explain. I didn’t make myself very clear, and I was afraid it might affect what you would have written. The last thing I want to do when you’ve been so kind is embarrass you, so I thought I’d better just … well … introduce myself. Jamie’s my partner: I’m Fran.”

  “I want to get my car serviced,” said Prufrock, trying to assess the mechanic’s bodily fitness without looking at him.

  “Sure,” said Roy Burgess. “This one?” He nodded at Rosie’s Volvo parked beside the kerb.

  “Er, no,” said Prufrock. (He thought Burgess might dive under it there and then and start unscrewing things.)

  “So what is it?”

  “Um – a green one.”

  Rosie passed a hand across her eyes. She should have known better. The old man could dissemble persuasively on any number of subjects, but fell apart at the thought of the internal combustion engine. And, indeed, much simpler forms of technology. Rosie had always suspected that the real reason a man with a cottage garden needed a gardener was that he couldn’t master the strimmer.

  She couldn’t leave him to stew. She got out of the car. “I’m sorry, Mr Burgess, I think he’s missed his medication again. Jump back in the car, Arthur, there’s a good chap.”

  Prufrock didn’t mind being slandered if it got him out of an embarrassing situation. He did as he was bade.

  Burgess watched him go in some confusion. “Doesn’t he have a car?”

  “Doesn’t even drive, poor chap.”

  “Then … why did you bring him to a garage?”

  Roy Burgess had all the physical appurtenances necessary to have taken the life of Jackie Pickering. He was a man of about Rosie’s age, not big but sturdy and compact. He had close-cropped hair, veering from sandy to grey, and straight grey eyes, and he spoke with the hint of a Derbyshire burr.

  A murderer? It’s not the sort of thing you normally wonder about people you’ve just met. Rosie was having to fight her way past the usual conventions to try to get a glimpse of who this man was behind them. Half a minute wasn’t enough. She needed to keep him talking long enough to reconcile what she saw before her with what she needed him to have done.

  She glanced around. They’d tracked Burgess Motors to an alley behind Arkwright Street, a couple of miles from his home. As a main road into Nottingham Arkwright Street was permanently busy, but The Vennel was the sort of back alley where dark deeds could be done with impunity. Apart from the three of them there was no one in sight; none of the buildings round about boasted an occupied window. It wasn’t a good place to start annoying an ex-SAS man who was already suspected of murder.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realise it was a garage.” She began backing towards the car.

  “I suppose it’s the name,” he said, watching her go. “A bit ambivalent, that. Sometime I’ll get the sign repainted so it says ‘Burgess Motors: A Garage’.”

  Rosie gave a weak smile, got back in the car and drove away.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “It’s short for Francis,” said the young man with t
he fair moustache. “My father’s Frank, he always expected his son would be just like him. I think the fact that I wasn’t going to be probably surfaced fairly early. I don’t remember anyone ever calling me Frank Junior.”

  Alex was serving him coffee in her office. She needed a minute to think about this and how, and even if, it affected what she’d written.

  She came to the conclusion that it didn’t. “As I see it, there are two ways we can handle this. We can leave it as it stands. It’s honest, it’s accurate, and the answer applies equally whether we’re talking of a mixed-sex relationship or a same-sex one.” Her eyes flicked up at him. “I’m sorry, do you prefer the term Gay? It just sounds so frivolous – flappers and feather boas and Bright Young Things.”

  Fran shook his head, hazel eyes sparkling. “I know what you mean. It makes you think bells must be involved somewhere. If you want the truth, when it’s just us we still call ourselves Queers.”

  Alex beamed, liking him. “The other option is for you to reword your letter, making clear the nature of the relationship, and for me to do the same with the answer. The substance of both would remain the same, but you might feel it would properly acknowledge a specific problem facing” – she hesitated but couldn’t quite bring herself to say it – “same-sex partnerships. It really is up to you. Do you want to talk to Jamie? I realise people at his work know about you, but perhaps he’d rather not remind them. As long as I know by Monday I can make any changes necessary.”

  “I’ll talk to him tonight. I think, if he’s agreeable, I’d quite like to have it out in the open.”

  Alex blinked. She wasn’t a woman who saw sexual innuendo everywhere. If Rosie had been here she’d have roared and said it again, and made sure everyone else got the joke as well. But it was one of those conversations that was always going to be fraught with possibilities. She cleared her throat. “We don’t use names, for obvious reasons; but people who’re close enough to you to be part of the problem can often work it out. Check that Jamie’s ready for that. If he is, I’ll do the rest.”